For years I was interested in learning Japanese, and from time to time I look up some Japanese text to "try" understanding it.
I wish I could read the Japanese text above. (Go Go Nippon ver. 2015)
Like sometimes when I see a Japanese word in some manga or anime, especially titles that sometimes left untranslated. I'll try to find it's meaning before going on. So yeah, Anime did help, but I was more focused on subtitles than my hearing.
I learned the Kana letters a bit early in my learning time, I memorized them all in few months (But actually only few hours really trying to memorize them.)
But Kanji letters? Oh, Kanji...
It's like Hell!!
The protagonist sums it all up. (Tokyo School Life)
Despite learning hiragana and katakana, everytime I want to start learning Kanji I feel discouraged... Well, my learning style nor goal did help any. (I want to learn Japanese to "read," not to "interact" so I don't plan to learn writing even though I think it's the wrong way to go.)
From the start of 2017 until now mid 2018 (NOW)
I feel like I improved a bit, I memorize many words, and I can guess some words I don't. Partly because I started to actually hear what Anime characters are saying now, and because I memorized the particles between the words so I know when a part of the sentence ends now. (As they don't use spaces.)
Some of them:
は, が (wa, ga) Topic markers. well, it's the first thing you learn in Japanese.
も (mo) means "too, also."
の (no) means ("the word after" of/belongs to "the word before")
から (kara) means "from (the word before it)."
Bear in mind, I'm still learning and might be wrong above,
if you know better tell me.
So I became good enough to finally be able to play Japanese games with help of translator, but looking up Kanji's in the translator without having an idea what is it, takes too much time. So I went to the next best option:
Recently there are many Visual Novels that allow Language switching on the fly, but the ones I liked are those Three:
Go Go Nippon!! My first Trip to Japan
This game is flawed, and more of wikipedia article with dating-sim elements, than an actual visual novel. But I love it, and characters while too generic are still fun to read and see. Sadly there are no character voices. (Oh, it has a very stupid protagonist too.)Tokyo School Life
As far as I played It's a generic dating sim and the protagonist isn't better than Go Go Nippon game. This game has the best Live2D character animation I've seen. And actually it's one of the few PC games that include Furigana.
- KaraKara
A story about the post-apocalypse world where humanity gained, Animal EARS? actually I'm not sure, I haven't played enough... But character interaction is too interesting, and the game is way less predictable than the previous ones.
"Your heaven isn't that hard to reach isn't it?" (Karakara)
All the three Visual Novels above
allow you to read Japanese & English at the same time.
Yaaaaay~
I first got Go Go Nippon in 2016 so I couldn't follow the Japanese text at the time, but now I can read it better, I still won't recommend it to a newbie as it lacks Voices.
- Tokyo School Life is the easiest to read since it the Japanese text is accompanied with Furigana, so it's the one of the three I'm playing to finish right now, maybe by the time I finish all the routes I'll be good enough to read the Go Go Nippon without much use of the translator.
Karakara is harder to read (well, because of voices it's still easier than Go Go Nippon.) But it actually has interesting story (It's supposed to be short but I'm still at the beginning.) Instead of half-edutainment half-dating sim game.
So, I'm in my journey to learn Japanese with these three games.
If, I persisted, That is.
"Yaaay, I'm part of a family now." (Tokyo School Life)
~Hope this post was a good read for you all~
Meet you in another